My daughter is more like me than she is her mother. This is not revelatory, it happens in the best of families, I’ve known it since she was an infant, practically. It’s more logical in our case than most, because Patricia and I separated when Claudia was very young, and she’s played the other role in the relationship. There have been times when she’s had to be too much of an adult for Patricia, too grownup. With me, a man, she was always a little girl. There’s less stress. She doesn’t know this, but it’s part of why it’s always been easy and comforting for her to be with me.
On the other hand, even though she lived close by until a year ago, I didn’t have to do the daily day-to-day. I got more cream and less skim than Patricia; but also less gut stuff, the making of the person. It’s a price you pay for divorce that’s immeasurable. She will always, at heart, be Patricia’s child.
After we polish off our pizza she wants to talk. About her mother, what happened from her child/woman point of view, about herself and what’s going on there. Gently but firmly, I stop her. She’s been too much burdened with adulthood, she thinks she likes it, the responsibility, but I don’t. We’ll talk; we’ll talk long hours about it; but tonight I want her to be eleven.
I read aloud to her before putting her to bed. We get lost in books, we’re both essentially loners and books are easier than the world sometimes; certainly more alive.
She wants to read something new, something I particularly like that she would like, also, something more ‘grown-up,’ so I find my Lattimore translation of The Odyssey, which I’ve had since college, dogeared and underlined, start with Book I: “Tell me, Muse, of the man of many ways, who was driven far journeys, after he had sacked Troy’s sacred citadel. Many were they whose cities he saw, whose minds he learned of, many the pains he suffered in his spirit on the wide sea, struggling for his own life and the homecoming of his companions …”
We get through half a Book before she fades. I mark the place, put the book on her bed-table. We’ll resume tomorrow. Maybe she’ll dream tonight of sailing, of water, this land-locked child of mine. Perhaps she’ll dream of her mother, who looks every day upon water.
I kiss her goodnight and close the door, and sit in the darkness with two fingers of Johnnie Walker Black and my thoughts.
I am searching for the perfect woman, and the perfect woman doesn’t exist, except in my fucked-up childish desires. I blew it with Patricia, granted it was both of us, but I was the lead player, we might still be together if I had worked harder at it. Strike that, it’s bullshit. We wouldn’t have stayed together, but we should have worked harder at it anyway, I didn’t know shit about staying together; ‘it isn’t working? Adiós.’ Holly, of course, was the disaster of all time, I don’t blame myself for that, but what was I doing with her in the first place? I fucked around on both of them, I fucked around in-between, finally a terrific woman comes into my life, practically throws herself at me, and the first piece of exotic pussy that crosses my line of vision, a born-again semi-virgin no less, stirs my loins. I’m going to be making love to Mary Lou tomorrow night, she’s going to do me better than Delilah did Samson, and I’d bet healthy money Evelyn Decatur will slip into my stream-of-consciousness. ‘You can’t always get what you want.’ They should engrave it on my tombstone. And of course when I do get it (which is more than I should, I wanted Mary Lou much more, didn’t I?), that it, whatever that is, isn’t what I wanted. Or thought I wanted.
By and large, I think therapy’s a crock of shit, all that inward narcissism, but I should go into it. I need to know why I’m such a bridge-burner, why I trash what’s most important to me. I did it to two wives, to the firm; what’s next, Mary Lou, my new practice, Claudia?
I keep thinking about how Patricia’s not such a good role model for Claudia, negatively comparing her to other women. Yet what right do I have to talk, to compare anyone to anything? What the hell kind of model am I as a man for my daughter? I’m a womanizer and a boozer; talk about being a role model, I’m a prize loser in that arena. And she has to know, she’s old enough now, she’s seen me lose jobs and relationships.
I have to change. For her sake if nothing else. I can’t let her see her old man go down the tubes; forget success in the marketplace, that’s shallow, that I can do in my sleep, it’s the waking world I’m inadequate in. I have to show her that there’s beauty and honesty in men.
Two fingers begets two fingers begets two fingers, before you know it you’ve killed the better part of a fine bottle; I resolve to put Johnnie-boy away so as not to pour that second drink. I want to sleep without a buzz. I want to lie awake, if that’s what it comes to, clear-headed. So if the thoughts come, they’ll be real.
But I am a weak-willed motherfucker, that I am. I manage to hold the line at two, small ones, mere sips, really, boon companions against the night.
Shit, I’ve become good at deceiving myself. A fucking master. I don’t even bother with pretense anymore.
And of course, when I do put the bottle away, I’m full of petty self-disgust. Scott Ray is the real thing, I should be flying, instead of dying in little shitty bits, not even heroically, but with the lamest of whimpers.
PART FIVE
“IN THE EVIDENTIARY HEARING for a new trial in the case of The State of New Mexico versus Jensen, Paterno, Hicks, and Kowalski, this court is now in session, Judge Louis Martinez presiding. All rise.”
Finally. After all the twists and turns and blind alleys and disappointments, after having door after door slammed in our face, after being told it would never happen, we’re here, back in the same courtroom with the same players we were with for the trial, a trial that feels like it took place a long, long time ago. Which it did, well over two years since that night Robertson first called, a damn long time, time enough for me to have blown off my firm, gotten a divorce, seen my child move away, and lost the most important case of my life. But what goes around comes around, with luck this time for the better, because this is it, I have no illusions, there will be appeals for years, but if I can’t do it this time, if I don’t spring these men here and now, with the new witnesses and information I have, I’ll never do it, and they will die in the penitentiary by the hand of the state.
“This is not a trial,” Martinez says, instructing us. “We are not here to judge innocence or guilt.”
I look over at Robertson, who’s presiding at the prosecutor’s table. He’s neatly pressed in one of his good courtroom pinstripes, his hair freshly trimmed, a week-end tan giving him a healthy, robust air. Moseby is with him. His attire is not as sartorially elegant.
Robertson had accosted me outside in the corridor a few minutes before the hearing started.
“Enjoy it while you can,” he’d warned me. “I’m not going to be content with just beating you this time, Will. I’m going to humiliate you.”
I’d kept my cool. I won’t rise to his bait; our side will conduct our case and not worry about his. He doesn’t have one, doesn’t need one. He can sit back and take pot-shots at our witnesses. As far as he’s concerned we’re fishing without bait, one last desperate attempt to pull one out of the bag.
“In a proceeding such as this,” Martinez is saying, “the burden of proof is not on the prosecution to prove guilt beyond a reasonable doubt. That happens at the trial phase. We’re here today because new evidence has come to light that may make us reexamine our findings at that trial; evidence that, if it is deemed sufficiently important, would compel us to grant a new trial.”
The bikers, manacled and in prison-blue jumpsuits, are sitting at the defense table with Mary Lou and me.
One last time.
“CALL RITA GOMEZ.”
Once more to the stand she comes, our Lady of Perpetual Sorrows. No kinky dresses and beehive hairdos like she wore on her first ascent to the scaffold, no inch-thick mascara or fuck-you ankle-strap high heels. She is being presented au naturel: acne, chapped lips and all. This baby’s come a long way, and it’s been all downhill.
“Do you swear … ?”
Her hand on the Bible, she does. Like she did the last time, with about as much conviction.
In front of me on the table is her transcript from the trial. Her pack of lies that sent four men to Death Row. I lift it for a moment, feeling the lying, incriminating pages sift through my fingers like dead, brittle leaves. Somewhere in the wilds of Washington state a tree was cut down to make the paper for this bilge, maybe a mature tree hundreds of years old, that provided shade and oxygen. A life-sustaining organism, now dead and riddled with shit.
Lone Wolf looks at her, seated on the oak chair, dwarfed by her surroundings; a frightened figure in a large, forbidding cave.
“She ain’t changed a damn bit,” he exclaims.
“Yes she has,” I answer him. “You don’t have a clue how much.”
“She looks the same to me,” he says. “Same dumb cunt.”
“You’ll see how much she’s changed once she starts singing,” I tell him.
“I’ll believe it when I see it,” he answers dubiously. She’s already burned them twice—first at the trial, then when she bailed out of the court hearing. Their only expectation of her is that she’ll somehow wind up fucking them over again.
She studiously avoids looking at them. She’s going to try and save them, but she doesn’t want any contact, eye or otherwise. She’s probably more scared of them now than she was then; she’s had two years to build the terror.
But she’s going to talk straight. Mary Lou and I have spent countless hours and days preparing for this moment. We did it ourselves; Tommy and Paul, our partners at the original trial, are no longer with us. Tommy was available for a long time, even though Mary Lou and I were carrying the ball he wanted to be part of it, but a couple months after the riots he was offered a great job with a firm in Albuquerque, and he couldn’t turn it down. He’d paid his dues and more, and he left the Public Defender’s office with his head held high. His new firm expects a lot of him, and he’ll deliver; of that I have no doubts. But with the workload of the new job, he couldn’t take the time to come up here and be with us.
He regrets it, feels he’s let us down; I assured him that isn’t the case; he pulled his oar and more for a long time. Life goes on. We’ll talk over the phone. He still sees Goose, it’s a relationship that will endure. Goose understands Tommy’s absence; he paid for a bottle of champagne to be delivered to Tommy’s new office his first day on the job.
Paul, on the other hand, flat-out disappeared. He and I’d been in sporadic contact for awhile after the trial, but it had become less and less frequent, and then one day, he was gone. His office empty, a new tenant occupying his space. Both his office and home phones had been disconnected, and there were no forwarding numbers or addresses. He just wasn’t there anymore.
My feeling is, he got tired of it all. He’d been in so many of these circuses over the years that to have been part of the losing side, after so much effort, took whatever starch there was left out of him; particularly since he had been the one to commit the only blunder—the opening of the ‘hot knives’ issue—that our team had made. We never talked about it, but I think that deep down inside he felt he’d been responsible, at least in part, for our losing.
He wasn’t, of course; any one of us could have made that same mistake. And that wasn’t why we went down. We were victims of symbols, not of logic and evidence.
He had his demons; like mine, they were fueled by drink. Too many gray cells finally burned off. It impairs the ability to take the shit and keep coming back for more.
Maybe that’s a blessing. If I don’t change my ways, I’m going to find out someday, undoubtedly the hard way. It’s a sobering thought.
I stand tall, smooth my lapels, taking my time. I pause for a sip of water, turn to face the bikers and Mary Lou, offer them a reassuring smile, and then I walk forward towards my witness, who sits perched on the edge of her chair, as wary as a possum caught in a trap, awaiting an unknown misery.
‘I have met the enemy, and he is us.’ (Pogo, one of my childhood heroes, said that.)
Time to engage the enemy.
Martinez had heard much of the documentation at the earlier hearing, but he can’t keep his eyes off Rita. Not now the dispassionate jurist, even-handedly dispensing justice, above the fray; he is a man who has to find the truth, the real truth, because of the circumstances under which he’d thought he’d found it back then.
Robertson, too, is riveted by her, making copious notes as she talks, constantly referring to the affidavit I submitted with her sworn testimony, the same bombshell I’d dropped in his lap when I’d first found her in Denver and she started her song of crime, punishment, and betrayal. At the beginning, when she starts telling how she was whisked out of town without bothering to leave a wake-up call, courtesy of Sanchez and Gomez, her father confessors, and when she talks about how the brainwashing started, he’s all over the place with objections. Martinez sustains some, over-rules others, but as we get deeper into her narration he shuts Robertson down.
“This is not cross-examination, counselor,” he admonishes Robertson. “Please let the witness tell her story in her own fashion. You’ll have ample opportunity to question her.”
Martinez turns back to Rita, abruptly dismissing Robertson, who slumps in his chair, fuming, turning to look over at our table, shooting poison daggers. The bikers nudge each other, stare daggers of their own back at him. Lone Wolf flashes him a wide smile that clearly says ‘fuck you where you eat, asshole, you shit all over us, now it’s our turn to reciprocate.’
She’s been on the stand for two hours, telling her story. The version she’d told me in the hotel room at the Brown Palace. It’s been grueling; she’s still scared to death of the consequences.
“So,” I say, “after all that time up in the mountains, they brought you back to Santa Fe. The police.”
“Yes.”
“And you gave your statement. Officially.”
“Yes.”
“And they told you—they impressed upon you—that if you changed your statement, recanted it in any significant fashion …”
“Did what?”
“Recanted … went back on it.”
“Oh. Right.”
“If you went back on it, they’d book you for accessory to murder. They said that to you directly.”
“Yes.”
I look at the prosecution table. Robertson’s scribbling feverishly. Moseby, who’s been intent on Rita and me, looks away with a start. The two cops, Sanchez and Gomez, stare forward stoically, two cigar-store Indians; see all, reveal nothing.
Martinez is looking at them as well. It’s a look I can’t decipher; but one thing I do know, he believes her. Maybe not completely, but enough that he’s become extremely unsettled. Four men were sent to be executed in his courtroom, in large part because of her testimony. Now she’s saying it was all lies, worse, not only lies, but crimes of deception, of corruption, the worst nightmare an honest jurist can have. In his courtroom, with him in charge.
He had read her new testimony. But that was words on pages; here it’s alive, from her own mouth.
I look at him. His expression is almost one of grief, of being stricken unawares. As if he personally was the one being lied to, as if he was the one, personally, who gave life to those lies. I feel for him; he’s an honest man, this isn’t supposed to happen. The ground is shifting under his feet, threatening to swallow him up.
He’s afraid for his reputation, for that of his court. I sympathize with him; it isn’t his fault. The system failed him, as it failed John Robertson. The difference is, he’s willing to see it, acknowledge it, make amends. Robertson isn’t.
“When they brought you back to Santa Fe,” I continue, turning again to her, “did they offer you the services of a lawyer?”
“No,” she answers, flat.
“Even though they’d warned you that you might be charged as an accessory to murder if your story didn’t hold up.”
“Yes.”
“Did they ever at any time read you your rights, that you had the right to an attorney, and that you had the right to remain silent?”
“No.”
“Your honor.” Robertson stands. “Miss Gomez was not a suspect, she was a witness. We don’t Mirandize witnesses.”
“You do if they may be indicted as accessory to murder,” I shoot back.
“Your honor,” Robertson says, his voice starting to rise, “there was never any intention on the part of my office to indict Miss Gomez. None whatsoever. So Mirandizing her was never an issue.”
“All right,” Martinez answers. “We’ll hold that in abeyance for now.”
“Until what time, your honor?” Robertson asks.
“Until such time as we determine the veracity of Miss Gomez’s statements, counselor. Then and now,” he says.
Robertson starts to say something more, thinks better of it, sits down.
Martinez turns to me.
“This is the extent of your written affidavit, Mr. Alexander,” he says. “Is there anything further you wish to ask your witness?”
“Yes, sir,” I answer. “There is one more thing.”
I turn to Rita again.
“The four men sitting at this table,” I say.
She forces herself to look at them; then quickly away.
“Yes.”
“You said at the trial that they raped you.”
Hesitantly: “Yes.”
“Did they?”
She looks at them again. They look back at her, their eyes cold, expressionless. Even though she’s on their side now, they can’t bring any compassion, it isn’t in their nature. They are, at heart, bad to the bone, men for whom raping her was nothing but a diversion.
“Yes,” she answers.
“Repeatedly?” I ask.
“Yes.”
“It must have been terrifying,” I say.
“Very.”
Against the Wind Page 44